1. The texturing process for this scene was a bit more complicated as it involved many more components but the principals remained the same. The floor, ceiling and wall panels were built up from a number of textures that all came from V7 Sci-Fi. For the pipe supports along the walls I started with a nondescript base metal which I tweaked and cloned a little to remove any conspicuous markings and then colour corrected before overlaying various vents and panels from the texture collection. In Fig.10 you can see in the bottom left corner a final render of part of the scene which shows some of the template on the right. Just above the circular vent is an edge which has nicely caught the light and this has been achieved through both geometry and texturing. The actual polygon on the model has had a chamfer applied along the edge to help produce a highlight but to emphasize this I have duplicated the wireframe layer in Photoshop which was exported from Max and used a Gaussian Blur around 3 pixels and then set the blending mode to Screen at 70% opacity. It is then a case of deleting any unwanted lines that do not correspond to an edge. This technique helps make highlights more aparent but more importantly perfectly aligns them with the mesh.The blue diplay panels also required some modification as they did not look bright enough in the render. When the texture was pasted onto my template it initially looked like the one visible next to the render - far too dull! In order to rectify this without modelling a seperate panel I copied the layer and set it to Colour Dodge (top left) and when overlayed over the original it effectively brightened the whole section and worked far better
fig.10
2. As this was a clean version of then Sci-Fi scene which was predominantly metalic I needed to make sure that the floor was quite shiny. In Fig 12 . you can see a render in the bottom left which shows a pretty clean surface with a few subtle highlights and some tarnishing. The textures used to make up this template are on the left of the image and on the right you can see how the lighter areas on the specular map help show some interest around the grooves and catch the light. The small oval lights were actual geometry in order that a glow could be applied in video post.
fig.12
3. When it came to the pipework I made sure to tick the generate mapping co-ordinates box when I made the cylinders in order that they wouldn't require mapping later on. It is then a case of applying our three textures in the relevant mapping channels as seen in Fig 13. We have the colour map in the Diffuse slot and so on and next to the labels are the amounts at which these textures are visible.When clicking on the map button you will be taken to a Co-ordinates dialogue box where you can set the tiling of the texture. In order to avoid stretching here it was necessary to alter the amount along the length of the pipe to 9 (the default being 1). This is then repeated for all three maps to ensure they align properly.
Click the image on the right to see larger versions.
fig.13
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4. The final stage after the texturing was complete was to provide a glow effect around the ceiling and floor lights which was done in Max using video post (Fig 14). With the lamp material selected go into the material editor and click on the material effects channel button (ringed in red on the left) and select a number - in this case 2. Then in video post under properties assign the same number in the effects ID box and you should see the results in the viewing window above. You can then go into preferences and specify the size and intensity of the glow as well as the colour which in this case is a user defined green / blue hue.
This image was created using a few of the hundreds of textures from the Total Texture CDs - very comprehensive texture collections priced with the hobbyist in mind. To see more examples, download free
samples and read full details follow this link
